|
A 'religion' founded by a schizophrenic. You get diagnosed, and the therapy for All Your Problems invariably turns out to be their patented and copyrighted therapy regimen ('The Bridge To Total Freedom') that consists of behaviorist methods to suppress symptoms of schizophrenia.
Of course, the method is generally the equivalent of someone using a flamethrower to light a cigarette held in your mouth. Some 'high level' regimens, notoriously "O.T. 5", cause many or most or all of the people who do it as it was originally designed to have psychotic episodes. And on the whole, the organization uses classical thought control, cult, and brainwashing methods- your mind really gets screwed with. The ironic thing is that it actually sort of works for treating symptoms of schizophrenia...but organization policy is never to admit any.
As an organization it is literally the inmates running the insane asylum: utterly totalitarian, terribly disciplined, and always unable to meet its owns standards or obey its own policies with any integrity. Interestingly, it regards the people outside its walls as criminals and insane, and since its own mission is Messianic (called 'clearing the planet') it would be wrong for it to actually obey 'wog' (non-Scientologist) laws and rules.
The reason it survives is because Scientology realized all the privileges given corporations in American society, especially religious "nonprofit" ones. Corporation is the institutional form in which American society has preserved all the colonial and medieval institutions of power that have been erased from the rest of public life. A corporation can be a monarchy, a theocracy, a slaveholding plantation, and deprive any class of people within it of any social, economic, or political right it chooses. Scientology is all of these things. It even has its own version of concentration camps- they don't kill people there, but when people leave they are broken. And they basically get people to give up all the money they have to them, which is why poor people never really get anywhere within the 'Church'.
Another aspect is that American society has not enforced civil rights with much honesty, a thing that became deliberate rather than accidental or unavoidable under the Nixon Administration- coincident with Scientology settling down in Clearwater, Florida, a perfect Southern haven for any organization which had no desire to comply with any civil rights. In Clearwater Scientology started doing everything the Nixon people were doing, including infiltrating the U.S. government offices that might regulate them and breakins into U.S. government files, etc. They don't go as far anymore, but they exploit the leeway given civil harassment and abuse of the judicial process extremely far. Corporate litigation nationally has followed trails they blazed to harass their critics, bankrupt them, and drive them into suicide.
You don't want to screw with these people. Most of them are fairly harmless, but the upper hierarchy is an exceedingly vicious bunch of people who know there can be no limits or limitations to defending the Church- if one corner unravels, the enormity of the scam and its great fragility are exposed.
They are a remnant of another time in American society- the psychopathological side of the white middle class of the late Forties and early Fifties, in its authoritarianism, fealty, ideology, pretended self-madeness, entitlement, subscription to the efficacy of 'technology' and pop psychology and UFO cultism and the drugs of the Fifties.
Don't get near these people. Let it all fade. There's enough on the Internet about it to keep you amused for years. (If you're a forensic psychiatrist, decades.) Their critics refer to them simply as 'the criminal cult'.
Scientology is moving overseas as it runs out of sufficiently wealthy, socially and religiously rootless, conservative Americans to appeal to. (Scientologists tend to vote libertarian or Republican.) Japanese and Europeans seem to make up ever more of the people taking their 'advanced courses' and big donors.
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
